Hacker News: squishington

New comment by squishington in "How Fairphone built the Fairphone Gen 6+"

squishington — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:54:01 +0000

I bought a fair phone 2 when I lived in Germany in 2016. Got a software update when I moved back to Australia. Bricked it. The kernel debug interface has no standard header, and required a fine pitch soldering iron header. I rented a German post box to send it to, as you need a European address for support. I tried to send it twice, and it was refused by German customs. I gave up and now I just buy cheap second hand Motorolas and unlock the bootloader, put lineageos on them. I think giving new life to discarded devices is more ethical anyway.

New comment by squishington in "True Rate of Unemployment"

squishington — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:06:28 +0000

The labor party doesn't know what it stands for anymore. The HAFF was supposed to make housing more affordable, but the housing minister said explicitly that she doesn't want house prices to decrease, rather increase at a rate slower than wage growth. But they have no plan for how to grow wages. So they are speaking out of both sides of their mouth, and the electorate will hear what they want to hear. Labor will make housing affordable for my kids in the future. Labor will protect my investment. The whole thing is a farce.

New comment by squishington in "Early 2000s were peak of humanity"

squishington — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:44:28 +0000

Well I live in Australia. The situation is quite different.

New comment by squishington in "Early 2000s were peak of humanity"

squishington — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:53:42 +0000

"Almost universally, any time closer to today is better for most people in most ways than a previous time"

Wind that back 20 years. Yeah we got cheaper computing. Luxury items got cheaper, necessities got more expensive. I can make do with a 2010 think pad, but my rent is cooked and I'll never own a house. I'd rather be born in the 70s than the 90s.

New comment by squishington in "Half of Europe's towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago"

squishington — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:38:05 +0000

I was referring to the relatively newer situation where house prices have outrun wages, which is more of a 21st century phenomenon in Australia. The capital gains tax discount introduced in the early 2000s largely contributed to this, and housing became a government supported avenue for lazy and secure investment. It has resulted in a wealth transfer from the young to the old, or to the offspring of investment property owning families. When you couple that with the worst renter protection laws in the western world, and very high rent growth, it has become a destroyer of social mobility that once existed in this country.

New comment by squishington in "John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)"

squishington — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:41:06 +0000

Regarding your first paragraph, I don't think the psychedelic experience is predetermined by the substance. There are common traits we all experience on a substance of course, but everyone has a different nervous system. Maybe Lilly even had a touch of schizotypal personality disorder, I don't know. Based on what I've read from Robert Anton Wilson it seems like Lilly was always a strange person, and difficult to understand. I see a bit of narcissistic grandiosity in him. In all his interviews and writing he never really acknowledges his research failures, for example. I think these personality traits could have contributed to his far out experiences and strange belief system. I think he really liked being seen as out there.

New comment by squishington in "Half of Europe's towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago"

squishington — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 09:50:48 +0000

I think the benefits will be short lived. The long term outcome is a new class division (asset inheritors versus pure wage earners with no inheritance). This is a terrible outcome for society. I'm not convinced high house prices generated a lot of wealth for governments. Government debt is higher than previous decades, and government asset ownership is lower. I think this has been a bad strategy.

New comment by squishington in "Half of Europe's towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago"

squishington — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:24:05 +0000

I grew up in regional Australia. All of my friends from there moved to the city because they wanted careers. Myself included. My friend who stayed there still works in farming and lives just above the poverty line, and can't compete for a rental so he lives in a shack in a paddock. House prices there also became ridiculous after the pandemic.

New comment by squishington in "John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)"

squishington — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:08:17 +0000

I think Lilly may have been sort of primed for intense psychedelic experiences. He had angelic visions as a child, and had a very religious upbringing. He was also a very imaginative person, so perhaps that influenced his trips a lot.

New comment by squishington in "The Corporate Creep of Plex: Why it may be time to move to Jellyfin"

squishington — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:08:42 +0000

I do this with friends and family. I'm not sure whether my solution is considered high friction. I gave them a router with openwrt installed, and a wireguard tunnel I set up, with a route to my jellyfin server. So they can point their jellyfin app on their TV to my server.

New comment by squishington in "I'm Done with Mullvad"

squishington — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:33:05 +0000

If you have any disagreements I'm keen to hear them. These are just my own observations so I want inputs from others outside my own echo chamber. If you CBF that's fine too though.

New comment by squishington in "I'm Done with Mullvad"

squishington — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:41:27 +0000

The mainstream media plays into this for sure. But I think there is a lot more to it. I think most of us on this platform have cosmopolitan leanings. We're educated and have some job mobility. I've worked overseas because I got an engineering education and did well in it. But wage stagnation, job insecurity, housing costs, low rental vacancy all play into this dynamic. There are a lot of people who don't like seeing their country change in its demographics. That is partly racism, but its also fear of change. I don't like it but I can understand it. When material conditions devolve, there will be a lot of people who blame the "other", even if its misidentifying the cause. I think Australia is lagging behind the right wing populist movement of the UK and US but we are on the same trajectory, and the major party policitians still don't understand how to address it. And most left wing people won't attempt to understand it because they at stuck using rationality and ethics as their rhetoric, and don't understand that emotion and grievance are going to trump that in politics.

New comment by squishington in "I'm Done with Mullvad"

squishington — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:45:38 +0000

There are social forces that are shifting the collective mindset to be more sympathetic to anti immigration sentiments. We see it in Australia recently, but the political analysis of this phenomenon is still lagging from my perspective (I am not endorsing these sentiments).

New comment by squishington in "I'm Done with Mullvad"

squishington — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:42:37 +0000

I use a VPN because I still seed 10s of thousands of torrents and have a static IP address. I don't want the swarm to see that. Most of them are from private sites I trust, but some from private sites that have a huge membership I'm not sure about. I have a lot of movies and music that isn't available anywhere else and archiving that is important to me. Kept my music collection from what.cd and a lot of that you can't even buy on discogs.

New comment by squishington in "The US grocery slowdown is real"

squishington — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 13:43:35 +0000

On the topic of shopping at the wrong place, in Australia we have a supermarket duopoly. Depending on where you live, you may only have the choice of Coles or Woolworths. They both suck. I'm lucky to live in the inner city and can shop at aldi or the local markets. People living in regional towns have less choice and are getting screwed over.

New comment by squishington in "I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64"

squishington — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:56:27 +0000

I feel this in my engineering work. My software goes into cars that are mostly bought by rich people. Not very satisfying. I'm somewhat lucky my work goes into real products rather than shelved research projects. But I get my kicks out of helping friends and family with IT tasks. Set up a pi hole for someone. Give them an openwrt router with a wireguard VPN to my jellyfin server. Set up a cheap thinkpad with Debian. It's basic but it makes a visible difference.

New comment by squishington in "The lost joy of music piracy"

squishington — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:09:19 +0000

It also had a sense of community that was never quite replicated on RED. The freeleech events were fun. I remember there was a release request for Kirk Van Houten's "Can I Borrow a Feeling?".

New comment by squishington in "Writers and Drugs"

squishington — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:40:59 +0000

Burroughs came from an upper middle class background. People with money are sometimes able to avoid some of the health dangers that come with heroin use. It's the heroin users who are poor that end up with the worst health outcomes. Malnutrition and risk of infection for example. Not being able to look after yourself because you have no money left.

New comment by squishington in "I have seen the dystopian future of elderly care"

squishington — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:29:06 +0000

Relevant article from the latest Arena quarterly in Australia:

https://arena.org.au/private-equity-public-pain/

New comment by squishington in "What the FCC router ban means for FOSS"

squishington — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:04:26 +0000

I use attended sys upgrade. I've been using OpenWrt for the last 7 years, but I've noticed that attended sys upgrade often fails at release time. And there are often point releases shortly after. I'm just skeptical that their infrastructure would handle mass auto updates at release time. I usually wait a few weeks after release until the masses have reported various device specific bugs before I upgrade.